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Undoubtedly beer tourism is growing phenomenon, and has been for some time. Fifteen years ago, when I was GM of the Celebrator Beer News, the “Hopspots” sections were the most popular in the brewspaper, as many readers reported that they always kept one in their car when they travelled to help them find a beer spot (remember that was before smartphones and GPS were ubiquitous). I know for at least thirty years I’ve been including beer destinations any time I travel, even before I did so as part of my profession. Having that information at your fingertips through apps, websites and GPS has only helped to increase beer travel, I think, and at least part of the success of beer weeks has to do with the goal of bringing tourism to specific geographic areas; essentially making the week the destination rather than a side trip. So it’s interesting to see that a popular travel website, Travelocity, is not only recognizing how beer people travel, but has created a Beer Tourism Index to rank the Top Beer Destinations, dividing them by large and small metro areas (though I’m surprised they consider Santa Rosa-Petaluma, Lancaster PA and a few others as “large”). Also somewhat curious is the total absence of the San Francisco Bay Area, or even San Francisco or Oakland/East Bay in the listings. What’s especially odd about that is that San Francisco is one of the top tourist destination cities (it’s number two according to EscapeHere and #5 according to TripAdvisor and #3 via Business Insider). At any rate, according to their press release.

By examining the location of all breweries in the U.S. and looking at other factors important to a successful “beercation,” including the availability of rideshare services, accessibility via air, and the average cost of lodging, this index identified the best large and small metro areas to sample some of the nation’s best craft beers.

Here’s the full list below:

And here’s the criteria used to arrive at this list:

*To find the top metropolitan areas for beer tourism, Travelocity scored the over 300 US MSAs (Metropolitan Statistical Areas) on four factors:

Breweries per 1 million residents: Working with the Brewers Association (an organization representing the majority of independent brewers in the US), every MSA was scored by the number of breweries and brewpubs per 1 million residents

Rideshare availability: To get a full sampling of a region’s beer culture, a beer tourist may need to visit multiple breweries across the area. Rideshare services like Uber or Lyft are invaluable for this, so each MSA was scored on availability of both, either, or neither of these services.

Nonstop air destinations: If the MSA has an airport with scheduled air service – from how many destinations is nonstop service available?

Lodging score: Each MSA was scored on the price of an average room night for the 2015 calendar year. The lower the price, the higher the score for the MSA.

Beer tourism is a big deal. We estimate that in 2014, more than 10 million people toured small and independent craft breweries. That’s a lot of brewery tours. Just search “beercations” and you’ll get a plethora of results on where to tour local breweries.

More than 7 percent of craft sales (by volume) now happen at the source—the brewery. Craft brewers are now a main attraction for travelers. For example, in 2015, the Brewers Association’s three-day Great American Beer Festival generated the equivalent of 2 percent of Denver’s GDP, accounting for $28.6 million. Beer tourism is so strong that travel website Travelocity just published a beer tourism index.

In a Travelocity survey of 1,003 people, more than three-quarters said they would like to go on a trip where they visited craft breweries and sampled local beer. With numerous beer trails flourishing across the U.S. and beer events including festivals and special beer releases racking up millions upon millions of tourism trips and dollars, the modern beercation is a boon to beer.

The Brewers Association commissioned a Nielsen Omnibus panel in June 2016 that asked, “How many, if any, craft breweries have you visited at their site in the past 12 months while traveling?” The answer: on average 2.1 breweries. Impressive.

Our 93rd Session is hosted is Brian Devine, who writes The Roaming Pint, along with Maria Scarpello, and the pair “have been traveling around in their 29-foot RV, named Stanley, since August 2010 seeking out all kinds of great beer destinations.” For their topic, they’ve understandably chosen Beer Travel.

Since travel is such an important part of our lives I wanted our topic to focus on beer travel. In Session #29, Beer by Bart asked writers to tell them about their favorite beer trips to which they got some great responses of personal favorites and general tips for certain cities.

So as not to tread over old ground my question is going to focus on the “why” more than the “what”. So I ask you fellow bloggers and beer lovers, why is it important for us to visit the place the where our beers are made? Why does drinking from source always seem like a better and more valuable experience? Is it simply a matter of getting the beer at it’s freshest or is it more akin to pilgrimage to pay respect and understand the circumstances of the beer better?

Beer travel has exploded in the last few decades and has become a far bigger part of the success of smaller and local breweries than we often acknowledge. When I was a kid — yes, I’m old — most of the big breweries offered tours but because there were so few operating in the U.S., they were few are far between. Before I was old enough to drink I’d been inside the Budweiser brewery in Virginia (then associated with what used to be called Busch Gardens: The Old Country, an amusement park in Williamsburg), Yuengling (not too far from where I grew up in Pennsylvania) and the old Reading brewery in my hometown (though not for a tour, my stepfather stopped by to see a friend, with me in tow). But apart from the national breweries and the regionals hanging on by their fingernails, there simply wasn’t a lot of beer tourism opportunities around.

Abroad was slightly different, certainly in nations with rich brewing traditions. But this was before Americans traveled very much, before air travel became affordable for many more people. When I was young, a trip by plane was rare for almost everybody I knew. I was ten before I set foot on a plane, and I still beat many of my friends into the air. By contrast, my kids had flown maybe a dozen times before they reached double digits, and tellingly they’ve been complaining lately that it’s been far too long since we’ve taken a vacation via airplane (so we’re spending Thanksgiving in Hawaii). But back then, most people who discovered good beer in other countries were stationed there as part of their military service or had business travel in Europe. You hear that story repeated a lot.

My first trip to England was in 1982, when I was still a civilian, but I still managed to visit a couple of breweries — Fuller’s and the old Orange Brewery in Pimlico, an early British brew pub. But among my friends, at least, that was still a rarity. I moved to California in 1985, and between the many new breweries opening then along with Safeway’s Liquor Barn chain, things finally started to open up. But it’s been a slow, if steady climb. With renewed interest in beer generally, travel to beer locations like England, Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic seemed to increase dramatically, and there were tour companies set up for the occasional beer tour, and some of the early beer magazines set up their own tours, as well. Little by little, breweries started getting more visitors each year. The smart ones prepared for them, hired tour guides, created gift shops with merchandise to sell, added tap rooms for sampling, which only increased the people coming.

Inside the Trappist brewery at Rochefort.

In the 2000s, beer weeks started emerging, providing even greater incentives for beer travel. Smart tourism boards in cities and towns embraced these as a way to encourage travel to their areas, and the beer weeks that have flourished have been great for their respective hometowns. I used to keep track of all the beer weeks (though sadly have fallen behind) but as of a couple of years ago there were over 100 beer weeks worldwide, though the bulk of them are in North America.

But now that we’re approaching 3,000 breweries in America, beer travel has gone mainstream. There’s just so many to visit, and most new breweries plan for visitors. Few breweries open these days without merchandise, tours or a tasting room. They know people will visit them, in a children of the barleycorn “if you build it, they will come” sort of way. Many guilds and visitors centers have created brewery tour maps as part of the literature available for tourists, knowing many will ask for this information. People, friends and relatives, I know who are outside the beer bubble most of us live or work in, are coming back from trips with tales of breweries visited, something almost unthinkable a decade or two ago. Even my recently retired schoolteacher uncle and nurse aunt, who barely drank a drop before, are counting breweries as places visited in their globetrotting golden years. It’s definitely become a thing, with a life of its own.

But the question posed by this Session’s host was not is it happening, but why? Why do we want to visit a brewery? Why is the source a “valuable experience?” It is, if you think about it, a curious development. Breweries are, at their most basic, factories; manufacturing plants; or temples to scientific and technological achievement. I’ve never admired my television enough to visit the factory where it was produced, nor virtually anything else in my home. These things may even inspire me, or make my life easier, or better, but I’ve never mustered the same curiosity about how they were made that would make me set sail on a pilgrimage to their birthplace. I’m not dying to see where the car parked in my driveway came to life, so to speak. Why not?

I’m sure someone will come up with a better answer, but I think it’s because those are all tools. They remain outside of ourselves. Beer, like all food and beverages, we ingest. It literally becomes part of us. We take it in and it becomes part of who we are. Clothes don’t make the man (or woman), but food and drink do. Food and beverages feed our soul. Food starts grand novels. Drinking fuels poetry.

Given my love for potatoes, you won’t be surprised to learn I’ve visited several potato chip makers. I’ve even been to two pretzel factories. Growing up, Hershey’s Chocolates (near where I grew up) had a wonderful tour inside the plant, the air positively thick with chocolate aromas as you walked past giant vats of it (sadly, today it’s merely a ride at Hersheypark where they pump in the chocolate smells as you sit passively in a moving car winding through dioramas). The point is I want to see where my food comes from, especially my favorite foods.

With beer, for me at least, the importance of seeing the brewery is the context. I like seeing where it was created, the space itself, the coiled hoses (ask anybody), the gleaming copper or stainless steel brewery porn. I love the smells hanging in the air, both in and around the brewery. Hearing (and seeing) the brewer explaining his process, or how he came up with the idea or recipe for a beer, is different on his or her home turf, as opposed to a meet the brewer event at a pub or behind a table at a festival.

Similarly, I like to see where the hops were grown, or the barley malted. Does it make the beer taste better? No. Does it even make me appreciate it more? Maybe, but probably not. It’s just the context of seeing where it came from, how it was put together and then tasting the finished beer. It’s a more complete picture, but I’ll certainly enjoy the beer without all that pageantry. That is, my taste buds and stomach will, my soul is another story. For that to be piqued, I need the added context of place; of geography. Where, and under what circumstances, we eat or drink anything, will alter the way it tastes, the very experience of tasting it. We know this to be true, so why should it be a surprise that place matters. Location, location, location.

For our 93rd Session, our host is Brian Devine, who writes The Roaming Pint, along with Maria Scarpello, and the pair “have been traveling around in their 29-foot RV, named Stanley, since August 2010 seeking out all kinds of great beer destinations.” For their topic, they’ve understandably chosen Beer Travel.

Since travel is such an important part of our lives I wanted our topic to focus on beer travel. In Session #29, Beer by Bart asked writers to tell them about their favorite beer trips to which they got some great responses of personal favorites and general tips for certain cities.

So as not to tread over old ground my question is going to focus on the “why” more than the “what”. So I ask you fellow bloggers and beer lovers, why is it important for us to visit the place the where our beers are made? Why does drinking from source always seem like a better and more valuable experience? Is it simply a matter of getting the beer at it’s freshest or is it more akin to pilgrimage to pay respect and understand the circumstances of the beer better?

Not “Stanley,” but certainly a worthy steed for beer travel.

So put on your walking shoes or those boots that are made for walking, whichever you prefer with your beer. According to Brian, participation in November’s Session simply requires that you “write a response to one or more of the questions above and then post a link to the article” in the Roaming Pints’ comments section by November 6th.

Today’s beer video is in honor of today being the feast day of St. Veronus, who’s the patron saint of Lembeek and Belgian brewers. It’s a tour of Brewery Cantillon, shot in 2009 by the staff of The Beer In Me. It’s a short, almost ten-minute walk around the brewery museum in Brussels.

My friend and colleague, Gerard Walen, has an interesting story on CraftBeer.com about a mobile brewery that drove from Florida to Oregon. In Collaboration On the FL-ORegon Trail, Walen details the rolling brewery built by the Dunedin Brewery and its journey to Oregon, and then on to Denver for GABF. Check it out. Gerard can normally be found on Road Trips For Beer, and recently finished the Florida Breweries book in the same series as my northern California guidebook, which will be published this April.

Today’s infographic is a travel guide to visiting English breweries and other beer destinations by train, entitled the Rail Ale Trail. It was created last year by Red Spotted Hanky, a UK travel website.

Today’s infographic is courtesy of Travel Insurance, and is entitled A Beer Tour of America. It’s geared toward the big boys and a few of the larger regionals, but if you were shopping for travel insurance, this would still be a far better way to spend your time.

Take a tour of the Suffolk brewery Greene King with head brewer John Bexon hosted by UK beer writer Roger Protz. The video, entitled The Magic of Brewing, the Joy of Beer, runs just under a half-hour and includes a tour of Greene King’s “traditional brew house and fermenting area, taking in the ancient wooden vats where Strong Suffolk is matured.” Enjoy.

Travel + Leisure magazine, in their July 2011 issue, made their picks for America’s Best Beer Cities. Actually, the title is a bit misleading. It’s not really the “best” cities so much as the most “popular;” and most popular according to the magazine’s readers; and not all of their readers but specifically the ones who took the time to answer the poll. Looking more closely, the readers polled were asked to choose among 35 pre-chosen cities, too, meaning there was no chance for any town not on the starting list, too. Asheville, NC, for example, was presumably not among the 35 cities on Travel + Leisure’s list.

So that’s a very different thing and probably accounts for what I can only describe as some odd, but interesting, inconsistencies with other similar polls. Certainly Portland deserves the top spot, though it probably goes without saying I’d place San Francisco a tad higher than ninth. But Philly fourth from the cellar — along with San Diego even lower? — that seems like a travesty.

It does, however, tell us how people who like travel enough to subscribe to a periodical devoted to it perceive which cities are best for beer. Undoubtedly, many people voted for their local city so in a sense it’s partly a reflection of the magazine’s geographic readership. But that probably doesn’t tell the whole story. When asked to rank 35 cities, most people (apart from the very well traveled) I’d wager have not been to all of the cities. That would mean they’d be inclined to go with what they’d heard or read about the cities they hadn’t personally visited. They’d make a value judgment based on that particular city’s perception of beer-worthiness. Seen through that prism, it’s a more interesting list, to me at least. It also means I need to visit Savannah. What’s your take on the list?

The Street is a financial media company that covers the business world. Apparently they noticed that craft beer is doing well and put together a list of the
10 Best Craft Beer Vacation Destinations. Here’s the list below, though it’s not clear to me if the destinations are in any particular order or not.

Full Sail Brewery, Hood River, OR

Stone World Bistro and Gardens, Escondido, CA

Highland Brewery, Asheville, NC

Brewery Ommegang, Cooperstown, NY

D.G. Yuengling & Sons brewery, Pottsville, PA

Portland, Maine

Samuel Adams Brewery, Boston, MA

Sierra Nevada Brewery, Chico, CA

Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Milton/Rehoboth Beach, DE

Wisconsin

I love Yuengling, and it is a great tour, but it’s hard to lump America’s oldest brewery in with the more recent craft brewers. And the new owners of Anchor Brewery will be surprised to learn that they’re owned by North American Brewing, as incorrectly cited in the article.

Overall, it’s not a bad list. I’ve been to seven of the ten destinations and can attest to those, and I’ve heard great things about the other ones. But it seems weird that Colorado, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon are all noticeably absent. What places do you think are missing?